The Ethiopia/Kenya Running Phenomenon

How running has responded to East African dominance is a credit to the sport

The big spring marathons are just ahead - Rome (March 23), Paris (April 6), London (April 13) and Boston (April 21). One absolutely safe prediction is that almost all the top places will go to Ethiopia and Kenya. One small geographical area, about 1/60th of the total of Africa, will be utterly dominant in a major sport practiced ardently all around the globe.

In 2013, there were 149 male marathon performances faster than 2hr 10min. Eighty of those were by Kenyans, 47 by Ethiopians, plus eight by Eritreans and Ugandans, from the same region and similar ethnicity. (My tally includes one Kenyan now a Qatar citizen.) That's 134 out of 149, and leaves only 15 sub 2:10s done by other runners (including Dathan Ritzenhein). The same ratio prevails until you go quite deep. In the 2013 merit rankings compiled by All-Athletics.com, only nine of the top 100 men are not East African. From 101 to 200, there are only 14 from other places - Japan, Brazil, South Africa, Mongolia, Italy, and Boulder, Colorado (Jason Hartmann, ranked 194). From 201-300, the ratio is still 69/31. Of the best 300 men in the world today, 246 are East African. With the women, while the ratios are less extreme, they are moving closer to the men's every year.

This may be stating the obvious, but that doesn't mean the obvious is not worth thinking about. These are statistics without parallel or precedent. No globally popular human activity has ever been so dominated at elite level by people from such a relatively small region. Italians are good at singing, but not 90% of great singers are from Italy. South Americans are good at soccer, but the equivalent to running would be if the final sixteen teams in this year's World Cup were all South American.

This extraordinary state of affairs has come about in less than fifty years. In the 1964 Boston marathon, the top ten men came from five nations on three continents – Belgium, Finland, Canada, USA and Argentina. In that year's Olympic marathon, five continents were represented in the top ten finishers. It's impossible that the 2014 spring season will see any such range in the top placings.

The physiological causes have been investigated, and the coaching cultures that help make these athletes so good; and there has been constructive thought about the competitive implications, what America needs to do to put its developing runners back in the race.

I want to ask a new question. How has running responded? Running has become used to this strange situation, but we've had precious little time to reflect on what it means. What is the reaction of our booming global sport/industry/culture/social phenomenon to this sweeping take-over of its most profitable sector, by a seemingly bottomless pool of talent that fifty years ago we didn't know existed? It's an important question, in a world that is increasingly globalized but still far from free of racism or exploitation.

And the answer is profoundly to the credit of the sport of running.

The Kenyans, and more recently Ethiopians, generation after generation of them now, have been accepted entirely on their merits. They have been welcomed, admired, and rewarded, as people who do something that we love (run fast for a long way) better than we ever dreamed. Every effort has been made in our specialist media to give them the attention they deserve, led by Running Times, with profiles, analysing their training for us all to learn from, and putting a good many on the cover, always striving to present them to our readers as distinct human beings. The account of the working life of Haile Gebrselassie in the March issue is the latest example. If the very talk of African elites makes you switch off - and there are runners for whom these talented and hard-working individuals are only “some Kenyan” - well, that has not been the response of the sport as a whole.

Even our ordinary citizens in ordinary cities have proved generous. On the streets of the Utica Boilermaker 15km every year, the crowds chant “Africa! Africa!” (as reported by John Pitarresi in the Observer-Dispatch) to cheer runners whose names they don't know and couldn't pronounce. Not many sports fans so eagerly encourage visitors who are blitzing the home team 10-0. Once familiar, they are fully embraced. Tegla Loroupe was a loved figure in New York, Catherine Ndereba won the hearts of Maine, and Haile's happy-face smile is world famous.

Among committed runners and people involved in running – coaches, race directors, agents, media, the running-travel business – there has been a huge effort to climb the steep learning curve of knowledge about the African runners, their personalities, training, home environment, social backgrounds, languages, and cultures. Every major running writer I can think of has been to East Africa at least once. Some have become deeply expert. Interviews and conversation in media centers now are of a different order from fifteen years ago.

Has there been exploitation? Yes, probably – see the comments about some agents that I quoted last year from Wesley Korir (The Journey to Gold, Roger on Running Nov 20, 2013). But there are far more positives. Information has been shared. Books and many articles have been written, and films made. Big tour groups go to African races. Real friendships are commonplace. Some Western runners have become bonded with East Africa. Running-based charitable projects have been initiated, like Toby Tanser's Shoes for Kenya. Events have been collaboratively created, as important as the Great Ethiopian Run, with more than 30,000 finishers in 2013, or the Safaricom Marathon at the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya, where runners' entry fees have saved species of rhino and zebra, and enabled local people to give up poaching.

A similar event had its second running on March 15, the Rift Valley Marathon, at Mosoriot, Kenya. RVM was founded by three self-described “crazy but idealistic” Canadian runners calling themselves “RunforLife,” in collaboration with the equally philanthropic Kenyan ex-elite Laban Rotich (fourth in the 1500m at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics). One of the founders, broadcaster Paul Kennedy, told me by email,

“Groups of Canadian runners came to train in Kenya, and Laban had them digging wells and distributing computers to schools. One night over Tusk beers a few of us had the idea of the race. From its proceeds, RunforLife funds microprojects by women in the Great Rift Valley. Last year, for example, we funded the construction of a chemical cattle dip that protects cows from deadly insect bites. The women turn the profits into other projects, like a paw-paw plantation.”

John Carson, another founder, a former Canadian elite runner, reported from the second running of the RVM last week,

“We created a 21km loop that crossed the river valley, making it one of the toughest but most spectacular certified marathons anywhere. With dancers, music, mud, and more, it was a Nandi good time. The funding goes to a women's poultry operation.”

Last month, a world-class running track was opened in Iten, Kenya, donated and maintained by the Virgin-Money London Marathon. For five years, British runners including Mo Farah have been attending a winter endurance altitude training program in Iten, also funded by the London Marathon. They go to Kenya to train with and learn from the world's best, to test and extend themselves in the Kenyan environment. Now they will have access to a top-class facility, one that is intended also to help Kenyan runners get even better (!), as well as being used by the girls who attend the Lornah Kiplagat Sports Academy, many from underprivileged backgrounds.

It's not just a hand-out from rich to poor. It takes no resources out of Kenya. It should help Kenyans and Westerners alike fulfil their running potential, and in the best cases their earning ability. And the initiative comes not from any government or aid charity, but from running, financed from a marathon's own budget, and intended primarily to help running itself, in Kenya and elsewhere.

“If you can't beat 'em, join 'em,” goes the old adage, and a good many Western runners have been doing just that. Twin brothers Jake and Zane Robertson virtually ran away from home when they graduated from high school in suburban New Zealand in 2007, to live and train in poverty in Iten, Kenya. (Jake and Zane Robertson by John Gugula, May 6, 2011.) It was a life-changing step for young men who were no more than promising as runners, and they came in for a lot of skeptical criticism. Last week in Sopot, Poland, Zane Robertson, who now lives in Addis Ababa, made the final of the world indoors championships 3000m, breaking Nick Willis's New Zealand indoors record with 7:44.16.

His brother Jake watched the race on TV in Iten with Scottish runner, Myles Edwards, who has had five extended periods in Kenya since 2011, and contributed insider reports to this column (eg Diary from Iten 2, Roger on Running, May 30, 2012). I asked Myles who goes there, and how they benefit.

“There are about 30 serious Western athletes at any time in Iten, plus some recreational runners. About ten of us are in simple rental houses. You can't come here for two weeks, live in luxury, and think you've cracked the secret of the world's greatest athletes. You have to train, eat, and sleep like them. And it's not just the environment and lifestyle, it's the work ethic. At the end of my last trip, I thought I couldn't have worked harder. But the attitude here has told me not to accept that, you have to keep pushing new limits. I've gained a lot from Jake [Robertson], who picked up a lot from the Kenyans - using their stuff as jigsaw pieces for his own training. You never stop learning.”

Another learning project was when top Ethiopian coach Sentayehu Eshetu was “coach in residence” last year at Shrewsbury School, England, the birthplace of cross-country (Running Old and New, Roger on Running, Sept 21, 2011). That was a perfect conjunction of the past and present of running. Twelve young Shrewsbury runners then trained in Iten and Bekoji, Ethiopia, in October 2013.

With English high school runners in Bekoji, thirty mixed Scots, Kiwis, and others in Iten, all those Canadians digging wells in Mosoriot – how many young Western runners are there, training their brains out this week in Kenya and Ethiopia? That, too, is an extraordinary situation – and entirely new. Unlike most visitors from the first world to the third, they are the ones doing the learning.

Running rightly congratulates itself as a positive force in our society, for its contribution to health, and its transformation of lives. But this response to the phenomenon of East Africa is equally positive and important. Confronted with such an overwhelming incursion when it had only just become a professional sport, running could have been forgiven if it had closed down, or restricted access. Instead, true to its own creativity and inclusiveness, it has recognised East Africa as the greatest energy source in modern running, something to be welcomed and learned from. The world, not just the running world, is better for that response.